Wednesday, August 22, 2018

I just read a 1998 interview with
Douglas Adams, published in the Salmon of Doubt, where the genius
author just finished a CD-ROM interactive game, Starship Titanic. He
really did think up many things in technology before they were
invented, such as a handheld device with wireless capability,
Bluetooth (he hated all the cords needed to connect his word
processor to all his other devices), a universal energy source
(American, British and European were never the same output) that
maybe someone could create from a car's cigarette lighter, etc.
Basically, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, thought up years
before there was easy access to the internet, was a sort of
Wikipedia, before Wikipedia existed. The Salmon of Doubt, mostly
Douglas Adams' posthumously published musings after his untimely
death, should be read just to get a rare glimpse into what a genius
mind looks like inside an amiable, ambling, all-around great guy.

But back to the interview regarding
Starship Titanic: the interviewer asked Douglas Adams if he was
concerned a new story first published as a CD-ROM (instead of, say, a
book or movie) wouldn't be treated as a work of art. Adams' response
is he hoped it wouldn't be treated as art:

“Having been an English literary
graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since.
I think the idea of art kills creativity. That was one of the reasons
I really wanted to go and do a CD-ROM: because nobody will take it
seriously, and therefore you can sneak under the fence with lots of
good stuff. It's funny how often it happens. I guess when the novel
started, most early novels were just sort of pornography: Apparently,
most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from
there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add.”

He goes on to say that there's nothing
worse than a writer sitting down to create something of high artistic
worth, using Ian Fleming's Thunderball as an example. He happened to
find a copy lying around, and after a friend had mentioned Fleming
aimed to be “literate” instead of “literary,” Adams thought
it would be interesting to see what the novel was like, how it
compared to all the post-movie hype. And, of course, Adams saw that
it was written well. “It's interesting, because it was actually
very well written as a piece of craft. He knew how to use language,
he knew how to make it work, and he wrote well. But obviously nobody
would call it literature.” He goes on to add that being literate is
“good craft, knowing your job...I find when I read literary novels
– you know, with a capital 'L' – I think an awful lot is
nonsense. If I want to know something interesting about a way human
beings work, how they relate to each other and how they behave, I'll
find an awful lot of women crime novelists who do it better, Ruth
Rendell for instance.”

So here's the cool part. I had known
about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in high school, had learned
some of the lingo and jokes from people who had read the books, much
the same way a Monty Python sketch, and later perhaps Saturday Night
Live sketch would take on a life of its own and become part of our
public discourse. And then, I found a copy of Dirk Gently's Holistic
Detective Agency lying around. I started reading it because the whole
thing just looked curiously absurd, and I was shocked at how well-written it was. This book had passages more poetic than anything I
had ever read in any literature class, and the whole thing was
written in (dare I say it) a literate style that just flowed
together as if it had been easy to write. Of course, as I now
understand, much work went into making it look like it had been easy
to write.

I read the second Dirk Gently novel in
college, and the entire Hitchhiker series post-college, when I had
more time for leisure activity and could muse, again, about writing
fiction myself. This is the stuff that's art: craft that works, and
stuff that's really new. I was as amazed at the writing as I was at
how he was actually able to publish these works that were truly
funny. I mean, novelists are supposed to be writing serious stuff,
not comedy. Although, as Adams noted, this type of writing has more
literary worth than “Literature” with a capital 'L.'

The second cool part is that I, also,
looked at Ian Fleming's books while researching my current spy novel,
Hookers of Espionage, and found the novels and short stories
surprisingly well crafted. Ian Fleming has a sort of Hemingway tone
and feel – he's writing at the top of his craft, and he knows it.
Like Adams, Fleming died at a relatively young age with much writing
left undone – they had started making very successful movies of his
stories, and Fleming had just experienced a bit of fame and financial
success as a result, which he spilled over into his novels with a bit
of wry humor.

But as I looked closer to Fleming's
stories, I found that all but his last one, the Man with the Golden
Gun, were romances. One short story, the Spy Who Loved Me, was
written from the point of view of James Bond's love interest, and
another, A Quantum of Solace, was a story within a story, a story
told to James Bond about an Englishwoman in Jamaica who spurned her
husband, and later married a Canadian: both of these are romances in
a sense, but all the other James Bond stories are, quite curiously,
romance from the male point of view. And I think Ian Fleming is the
first guy to do it.

Hemingway, in a very real sense, is a
writer of romance, but everything he writes is so consumed by pity,
irony, and death, that there never really is a happy ending (except
perhaps Garden of Eden or, possibly, the Sun Also Rises). But Ian
Fleming seems to have perfected the male magazine style of writing
for the middle-class man interested in leisure activity: golf,
gambling, driving, diving, travel, drinking, and of course women.
It's as if Fleming has tapped into the male counterpoint of the
typical female reader of romance, creating a whole new sub-genre.

Of course, spy novels are published as
espionage thrillers. But I know, now, that the great spy novels are
romances. Specifically, they are romances written from the male point
of view, which, surprisingly, no one else is doing. Perhaps I should
corner the market on this one. After all, I aim to write literate,
and not literary.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

I'm going to start with two things.
One, I'm going to suggest that the answer of what to do about current
politics is deceivingly simple. Two, I'm going to talk about Star
Wars. Stick with me, because these things are related.

When I saw The Last Jedi, the seventh
sequel, or the eighth movie in the series, or whatever it is, there
was a point where I started to lose interest. Yes, the Rebels (or the
Resistance) are noble in their quest to confront and wage war with
the evil Empire...or the First Order, or whatever it's now called.
It's just that it's all too familiar. The (chronologically) first
Star Wars movie set basic plot lines the other movies followed,
sometimes to a fault. The first sequel (The Empire Strikes Back) made
history by ending on a down note, and the next (Return of the Jedi)
made another kind of history, ending on a happy note:

Return of the Jedi is where we get
Princess Leia's “sex slave” outfit, which is the origin of the
name of my first novel, Sex Slaves from Galaxy Seven. It's a comedy.
And a romance. But not a romantic comedy in the cinematic sense of
the phrase...more of a satire in the style of Kurt Vonnegut, John
Barth, Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams, Christopher Moore, etc. But I
digress...

This latest movie, The Last Jedi, was
all too familiar not only because the films have similar story arcs,
but because a lot of the political nuances in the film was happening
in real time, in the US and abroad. Okay, so after the first three
movies, we get the prequels, whose sole purpose is to tell us how
“good” Anakin Skywalker turned into the “evil” Darth Vader. I
expected something along the lines of the fall of Michael Corleone in
the Godfather, but no. It turns out that the Jedi don't really have
an existential grip on things, and some guy who proclaims to be evil
can just turn a normally good guy evil with a few well-placed
cackles. You can read the commentary on that, of how silly the plot
is of the Revenge of the Sith in my novel, Sex Slaves from GalaxySeven, where two space monks discuss just how preposterous it would
be for that sort of thing to happen. And then, you know, more
interesting stuff happens. In my novel, not in Revenge of the Sith,
because by that time the movie is over.

How would I have written the fall of
Anakin Skywalker? you ask. Easy. Just create a romantic tryst between
Obi -Wan Kenobi and Padmé
Amidala, somewhere in the second or third prequel. They are friends,
having bonded from the first prequel, where Anakin is still just a
boy. So Amidala goes to Kenobi for support because Anakin is acting
weird, spending too much time with Palpatine, and there you go.
Amidala realizes that Anakin Skywalker is a whiney little bitch who
is about to sell out everything good, and everything he loves, just
because he had a bad dream. Both Amidala and Kenobi try to bring him
back from Palpatine's influence, he gets jealous, feels betrayed, and
attacks Kenobi, who ultimately whips his ass.

What is lacking in the movie is any
motivation on Anakin's part. What we need is some reason where the
audience can say, okay, the guy has some reason for going to the dark
side. We still know he's evil, but we have a level of sympathy for
him. Have him face off with Obi-Wan first, and get burned half to
death. Then, when he's rebuilt as a cyborg, he hears that Amidala has
died, and he blames the Jedi Order. He then goes in to the temple, as
Darth Vader, and murders all the “younglings,” the children
learning to one day become a Jedi. Now he's a murderer, and the
transformation to evil is complete.

But no. In the movie, he kills all the
children first, simply because his new mentor told him to. His new
mentor, of course, being an evil Sith lord bent on taking over the
galaxy. And then Amidala and Kenobi confront him, trying to save him,
after he's already comitted genocide for no real reason. So what we
end up with is the only guy (so far) in the series who gets laid –
the only one who gets married – is the one guy who turns evil.
Sure, Han Solo and Leia Organa later on have a child, but that child
turns evil. It's almost as if George Lucas and/or Disney have weird
ideas about sex and romance.

So we finally get to the movies after
Return of the Jedi, with The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, and
what do we find? Years after Solo, Organa, and Luke Skywalker save
the galaxy, it's all messed up again. Some new evil government is in
power, weilding a leadership of two more Siths (including ex-Jedi Ben
Solo), and here we go again with the resisting and rebelling,
fighting for democracy while, here in real life, the populist
demagogue who is supposed to be President threatens the free press
while his critics declare proof that he's committed treason. There
are people on both sides, and we're supposed to engage in lively but
civil debate about the future of our government.

But wait, wait – even if you support
the Republicans in power, you're wondering why everyone is so
hostile. And I think they have a point. After all, Ben Solo is on
point, in that the Jedi have done everything wrong. The “dark side”
of the force always seems to be stronger, and the supposedly good
people are always struggling against those in power. What's the
difference, really, between a rebel and a terrorist? What made Han
Solo so cool is that he was a pirate. He didn't even try to follow
the rules; he just did his thing. That's what made Boba Fett so cool,
also: here was a bounty hunter operating on his own terms, not some
tool for the Empire or the Rebels.

So we're supposed to get along. We're
supposed to sit down with the other side and reason with them,
convince them that these Sith lords are bad people, as if it wasn't
already obvious. And by the time we get to the Last Jedi, I've about
had enough, because all these First Order guys were, in some way or
another, put into office. There are millions of people in the galaxy
that either voted them in, or supported them financially, or, perhaps
they just abstained from voting at all. And so the future of the
galaxy depends on a handful of rebels? They're going to save
everyone? What's the point?

Sure, there will be another movie.
Probably several more. Part Nine (IX) will be in theaters at some
point, and it will be entertaining, as they all are. But I just can't
support the Rebel/Resistance anymore. They've won so many wars,
literally decades of star wars, and humans just keep going back to
being evil and stupid. We need a new tactic, I think, and that's
where apathy comes in.

Caring isn't bad, it's just that we
have to have a sense of humor about everything. We need to be a
little less like the Avengers and a little more like Deadpool.